Jian Cui

Jian Cui, Zichuan Li, Luyi Xing et al.

Multi-agent collaboration systems (MACS), powered by large language models (LLMs), solve complex problems efficiently by leveraging each agent's specialization and communication between agents. However, the inherent exchange of information between agents and their interaction with external environments, such as LLM, tools, and users, inevitably introduces significant risks of sensitive data leakage, including vulnerabilities to attacks such as eavesdropping and prompt injection. Existing MACS lack fine-grained data protection controls, making it challenging to manage sensitive information securely. In this paper, we take the first step to mitigate the MACS's data leakage threat through a privacy-enhanced MACS development paradigm, Maris. Maris enables rigorous message flow control within MACS by embedding reference monitors into key multi-agent conversation components. We implemented Maris as an integral part of widely-adopted open-source multi-agent development frameworks, AutoGen and LangChain. To evaluate its effectiveness, we develop a Privacy Assessment Framework that emulates MACS under different threat scenarios. Our evaluation shows that Maris effectively mitigated sensitive data leakage threats across three different task suites while maintaining a high task success rate.

Jian Cui, Zirui Lan, Olga Sourina et al.

In the context of electroencephalogram (EEG)-based driver drowsiness recognition, it is still challenging to design a calibration-free system, since EEG signals vary significantly among different subjects and recording sessions. Many efforts have been made to use deep learning methods for mental state recognition from EEG signals. However, existing work mostly treats deep learning models as black-box classifiers, while what have been learned by the models and to which extent they are affected by the noise in EEG data are still underexplored. In this paper, we develop a novel convolutional neural network combined with an interpretation technique that allows sample-wise analysis of important features for classification. The network has a compact structure and takes advantage of separable convolutions to process the EEG signals in a spatial-temporal sequence. Results show that the model achieves an average accuracy of 78.35% on 11 subjects for leave-one-out cross-subject drowsiness recognition, which is higher than the conventional baseline methods of 53.40%-72.68% and state-of-the-art deep learning methods of 71.75%-75.19%. Interpretation results indicate the model has learned to recognize biologically meaningful features from EEG signals, e.g., Alpha spindles, as strong indicators of drowsiness across different subjects. In addition, we also explore reasons behind some wrongly classified samples with the interpretation technique and discuss potential ways to improve the recognition accuracy. Our work illustrates a promising direction on using interpretable deep learning models to discover meaningful patterns related to different mental states from complex EEG signals.